1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer control apparatus, a printer control method, and a computer readable recording medium stored with a computer program for controlling a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
A user can specify various setup items of printing conditions such as paper size and printing color, using a control program called a printer driver on a PC (personal computer) and transmit printing data on which such printing conditions are specified to a printer. A user can also select an output destination of printing data among a plurality of printers using a printer driver in a system where the printers are connected to a network.
However, there have been cases where it is impossible to execute printing desired by a user, for example, a printer selected by the user does not necessarily match a printing condition that the user wishes to specify, so that printing ends up being made on paper of a size different from the specified size.
In order to solve this problem, a printer selecting device is disclosed in which a list of printers is displayed by searching for the printers that match the printing conditions specified by a user so that the user can select one printer from the displayed list (see Unexamined Japanese Patent Publication No. JP-A-6-161685). This enables the user to select a printer that matches the desired printing conditions even when the user does not remember all the features such as the specification of each printer.
However, in case of the device disclosed in JP-A-6-161685, it only allows the user to specify a printer from the list of printers that matches the desired printing conditions. Therefore, in printing a document file, a user has to make a search of printers that match printing conditions first and then issue a printing instruction by specifying the printing conditions again.
In other words, it requires an independent operation for executing a printing process separate from an operation for searching printers that match the printing conditions, and the fact that the user has to go through cumbersome two stages of operations is a problem.